I recently had a cancelled transaction with paypal. I payed, an hour later the shop told me they don't have the product available. The payment was cancelled.

And then paypal froze the money in my account: "money withheld". 13 days after the transaction the money is finally back on my bank account and I think to myself: Avoid paypal, especially for large sums of money.

Of course Paypal loves to get an involuntary free two week credit from me and work my money without giving me anything back. And that they just freeze my money just shows you what kind of company paypal is.

I have actually found a very very nice solution to the high definition video(AVCHD) transcoding problem. I got the ffmpeg svn checkout from yesterday (21.08.2008) and it works great with this script, all in one. No need for extra tools. And it's quite speedy.

The only problem is that the current ffmpeg checkout does not listen to the -r parameter. So you have to manually override the frames per second when playing the file, e.g. mplayer -fps 50. I use mplayer -fps 50 -fs -af volnorm -vf pp=fd.

You need might need to adjust the path to ffmpeg in the script obviously, e.g. to $HOME/ffmpeg/ffmpeg.

Of course if you have a camera that records 29.97 frames per second you have to change the numbers accordingly. (-r 59.94)

If you've got several cores you may want to experiment with the -threads option and make sure you have compiled with --enable-pthreads, see below.

The great thing is that the video is encoded quickly - I get 23 fps on my celeron m530 notebook - and the video is perfectly in sync, and you only need ffmpeg, nothing else.

This nice little script encodes avchd m2ts files from e.g. an HD camcorder directly to mpeg4 avis. It uses a temporary file in the /tmp dir for the audio stream, but the rest is done using fifo pipes. You need to install the csh shell interpreter to run it. And you need to setup the environment from this package: (by invoking ./install, then ./installasroot, you need to modify the download script and change the JM version).

The script works badly on multi-core systems, but you can invoke it several times at once. It's originally a modified version of the script from this package, but I changed it so you can run it several times concurrently (with the same file names in different folders). I also added a check to prevent it from encoding files where the output files already exist. I recommend to run it on an entire directory for i in *.m2ts; do echo encoding $i; hdencode $i; done

If you want to upgrade your server system from Feisty to Hardy, make sure you're not running kernel 2.6.22-15-server, as the upgrade will crash with a problem creating your UFT8 locale, localedef will occupy all cpu. The work around is to simply boot 2.6.22-14-server and then do the upgrade. That will save you a lot of trouble.

If you've got the Samsumg yepp YP-T6 mp3 player and you have the problem where after a while the settings.dat gets corrupted and the mp3 keeps telling out it's out of battery, then you probably just have one or more files that the mp3 has troubles with during playback.

In my case it was an ogg vorbis file and I think it was probably because the bitrate was too low at some point in the file. Try deleting the last file you heard before the problem occurs and then post your results in the comments.

If you ever (try to) use UltraVNC Single Click to help Windows users from Linux, you will find out that it's not that easy. Though you can use the UltraVNC viewer in Wine, you may see disconnects after around 15 minutes. The easy solution lies in starting a regular TightVNC with these parameters:

xtightvncviewer -listen 0 -encodings "hextile copyrect"

Replace the 0 with the display number, e.g. 0 for port 5500 or 400 for 5900. (port = 5500 + x) You need to have the package xtightvncviewer installed for this to work in Ubuntu. The color parameter does not work properly in this configuration.

Or give ssvnc a try. It works even with SCIII (uvnc Single Click via SSL), supports different color depths and much more!

And if you've got a current wine version, you might as well use the original ultravnc viewer. It works fine by now.

I usually use ssvn and the following script to start the vnc listener and quit it when finished.

(Wow I love the auto-save feature of Blogger. And Opera really still has issues in Linux.)

92238: New sound theme for KDE

64763: Support for UltraVNC file transfers

Open the webpage http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=x to find out more about the bug, x being the bug number.

So there's a lot of things you can do if you're interested in KDE development. Of course you should first contact the developers of the part you want to fix to make sure there's not already someone working on it etc.

As most Linux Desktops already have Virtual Desktops, I've always wondered why multiple displays aren't mappable to a virtual desktop each. And it seems like wasn't the only one: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107302. Unfortunately noone seems to be at it even in times of KDE 4.1.

If you ever run into trouble trying to do something that should be really easy with git but doesn't seem to be, if you want to learn git or think you already know everything important about it, and in many other cases, this article about git is a must read:

I was trying to work out how to issue the standby command over dbus so that I can send my computer to standby with just a single click from a desktop icon. It turns out at least ksmserver can't receive such a command as there isn't even a type for it in kworkspace: